The Social Cancer

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Title: The Social Cancer
A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere

Author: José Rizal

Translator: Charles Derbyshire

Release Date: June 17, 2007 [EBook #6737]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOCIAL CANCER ***

Produced by Jeroen Hellingman.

The Social Cancer

A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere from

the Spanish of
José Rizal

By

Charles Derbyshire

Manila

Philippine Education Company
New York: World Book Company

1912

[Contents]

THE NOVELS OF JOSÉ RIZAL

Translated from Spanish into English

BY CHARLES DERBYSHIRE

THE SOCIAL CANCER (NOLI ME TANGERE)
THE REIGN OF GREED (EL FILIBUSTERISMO)

Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.
Entered at Stationers’ Hall.
Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.
All rights reserved.

Translator’s Introduction

I

“We travel rapidly in these historical sketches. The reader flies
in his express train in a few minutes through a couple of
centuries. The centuries pass more slowly to those to whom the
years are doled out day by day. Institutions grow and
beneficently develop themselves, making their way into the
hearts of generations which are shorter-lived than they,
attracting love and respect, and winning loyal obedience; and
then as gradually forfeiting by their shortcomings the allegiance
which had been honorably gained in worthier periods. We see
wealth and greatness; we see corruption and vice; and one
seems to follow so close upon the other, that we fancy they
must have always co-existed. We look more steadily, and we
perceive long periods of time, in which there is first a growth
and then a decay, like what we perceive in a tree of the forest.”

FROUDE, Annals of an English Abbey.

Monasticism’s record in the Philippines presents no new general fact to the eye of history. The
attempt to eliminate the eternal feminine from her natural and normal sphere in the scheme of things
there met with the same certain and signal disaster that awaits every perversion of human activity.
Beginning with a band of zealous, earnest men, sincere in their convictions, to whom the cause was all
and their personalities nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its usual cycle of usefulness,
stagnation, corruption, and degeneration.

To the unselfish and heroic efforts of the early friars Spain in large measure owed her dominion over
the Philippine Islands and the Filipinos a marked advance on the road to civilization and nationality. In
fact, after the dreams of sudden wealth from gold and spices had faded, the islands were retained
chiefly as a missionary conquest and a stepping-stone to the broader fields of Asia, with Manila as a
depot for the Oriental trade. The records of those early years are filled with tales of courage and

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heroism worthy of Spain’s proudest years, as the missionary fathers labored with unflagging zeal in
disinterested endeavor for the spread of the Faith and the betterment of the condition of the Malays
among whom they found themselves. They won the confidence of the native peoples, gathered them
into settlements and villages, led them into the ways of peace, and became their protectors, guides,
and counselors.

In those times the cross and the sword went hand in hand, but in the Philippines the latter was rarely
needed or used. The lightness and vivacity of the Spanish character, with its strain of Orientalism, its
fertility of resource in meeting new conditions, its adaptability in dealing with the dwellers in warmer
lands, all played their part in this as in the other conquests. Only on occasions when some stubborn
resistance was met with, as in Manila and the surrounding country, where the most advanced of the
native peoples dwelt and where some of the forms and beliefs of Islam had been established, was it
necessary to resort to violence to destroy the native leaders and replace them with the missionary
fathers. A few sallies by young Salcedo, the Cortez of the Philippine conquest, with a company of the
splendid infantry, which was at that time the admiration and despair of martial Europe, soon
effectively exorcised any idea of resistance that even the boldest and most intransigent of the native
leaders might have entertained.

For the most part, no great persuasion was needed to turn a simple, imaginative, fatalistic people from
a few vague animistic deities to the systematic iconology and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish
Church. An obscure Bathala or a dim Malyari was easily superseded by or transformed into a
clearly defined Diós, and in the case of any especially tenacious “demon,” he could without much
difficulty be merged into a Christian saint or devil. There was no organized priesthood to be
overcome, the primitive religious observances consisting almost entirely of occasional orgies presided
over by an old woman, who filled the priestly offices of interpreter for the unseen powers and chief
eater at the sacrificial feast. With their unflagging zeal, their organization, their elaborate forms and
ceremonies, the missionaries were enabled to win the confidence of the natives, especially as the
greater part of them learned the local language and identified their lives with the communities under
their care. Accordingly, the people took kindly to their new teachers and rulers, so that in less than a
generation Spanish authority was generally recognized in the settled portions of the Philippines, and in
the succeeding years the missionaries gradually extended this area by forming settlements from among
the wilder peoples, whom they persuaded to abandon the more objectionable features of their old
roving, often predatory, life and to group themselves into towns and villages “under the bell.”

The tactics employed in the conquest and the subsequent behavior of the conquerors were true to the
old Spanish nature, so succinctly characterized by a plain-spoken Englishman of Mary’s reign, when
the war-cry of Castile encircled the globe and even hovered ominously near the “sceptered isle,”
when in the intoxication of power character stands out so sharply defined: “They be verye wyse and
politicke, and can, thorowe ther wysdome, reform and brydell theyr owne natures for a tyme, and
applye ther conditions to the manners of those men with whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe;
whose mischievous maners a man shall never know untyll he come under ther subjection; but then
shall he parfectlye parceve and fele them: for in dissimulations untyll they have ther purposes, and
afterwards in oppression and tyrannye, when they can obtain them, they do exceed all other nations
upon the earthe.”1

In the working out of this spirit, with all the indomitable courage and fanatical ardor derived from the
long contests with the Moors, they reduced the native peoples to submission, but still not to the galling
yoke which they fastened upon the aborigines of America, to make one Las Casas shine amid the
horde of Pizarros. There was some compulsory labor in timber-cutting and ship-building, with
enforced military service as rowers and soldiers for expeditions to the Moluccas and the coasts of
Asia, but nowhere the unspeakable atrocities which in Mexico, Hispaniola, and South America drove
mothers to strangle their babes at birth and whole tribes to prefer self-immolation to the living death in
the mines and slave-pens. Quite differently from the case in America, where entire islands and districts
were depopulated, to bring on later the curse of negro slavery, in the Philippines the fact appears that
the native population really increased and the standard of living was raised under the stern, yet
beneficent, tutelage of the missionary fathers. The great distance and the hardships of the journey
precluded the coming of many irresponsible adventurers from Spain and, fortunately for the native
population, no great mineral wealth was ever discovered in the Philippine Islands.

The system of government was, in its essential features, a simple one. The missionary priests drew the
inhabitants of the towns and villages about themselves or formed new settlements, and with profuse
use of symbol and symbolism taught the people the Faith, laying particular stress upon “the fear of
God,” as administered by them, reconciling the people to their subjection by inculcating the Christian
virtues of patience and humility. When any recalcitrants refused to accept the new order, or later
showed an inclination to break away from it, the military forces, acting usually under secret directions
from the padre, made raids in the disaffected parts with all the unpitying atrocity the Spanish soldiery
were ever capable of displaying in their dealings with a weaker people. After sufficient punishment
had been inflicted and a wholesome fear inspired, the padre very opportunely interfered in the natives’
behalf, by which means they were convinced that peace and security lay in submission to the

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authorities, especially to the curate of their town or district. A single example will suffice to make the
method clear: not an isolated instance but a typical case chosen from among the mass of records left
by the chief actors themselves.

Fray Domingo Perez, evidently a man of courage and conviction, for he later lost his life in the work
of which he wrote, was the Dominican vicar on the Zambales coast when that Order temporarily took
over the district from the Recollects. In a report written for his superior in 1680 he outlines the
method clearly: “In order that those whom we have assembled in the three villages may persevere in
their settlements, the most efficacious fear and the one most suited to their nature is that the Spaniards
of the fort and presidio of Paynaven2 of whom they have a very great fear, may come very often to
the said villages and overrun the land, and penetrate even into their old recesses where they formerly
lived; and if perchance they should find anything planted in the said recesses that they would destroy it
and cut it down without leaving them anything. And so that they may see the father protects them,
when the said Spaniards come to the village, the father opposes them and takes the part of the
Indians. But it is always necessary in this matter for the soldiers to conquer, and the father is always
very careful always to inform the Spaniards by whom and where anything is planted which it may be
necessary to destroy, and that the edicts which his Lordship, the governor, sent them be carried out
.... But at all events said Spaniards are to make no trouble for the Indians whom they find in the
villages, but rather must treat them well.”3

This in 1680: the Dominican transcriber of the record in 1906 has added a very illuminating note,
revealing the immutability of the system and showing that the rulers possessed in a superlative degree
the Bourbonesque trait of learning nothing and forgetting nothing: “Even when I was a missionary to
the heathens from 1882 to 1892, I had occasion to observe the said policy, to inform the chief of the
fortress of the measures that he ought to take, and to make a false show on the other side so that it
might have no influence on the fortress.”

Thus it stands out in bold relief as a system built up and maintained by fraud and force, bound in the
course of nature to last only as long as the deception could be carried on and the repressive force
kept up to sufficient strength. Its maintenance required that the different sections be isolated from each
other so that there could be no growth toward a common understanding and coöperation, and its
permanence depended upon keeping the people ignorant and contented with their lot, held under
strict control by religious and political fear.

Yet it was a vast improvement over their old mode of life and their condition was bettered as they
grew up to such a system. Only with the passing of the years and the increase of wealth and influence,
the ease and luxury invited by these, and the consequent corruption so induced, with the insatiable
longing ever for more wealth and greater influence, did the poison of greed and grasping power enter
the system to work its insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the beneficent institution of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into an incubus weighing upon all the activities of the people in
the nineteenth, an unyielding bar to the development of the country, a hideous anachronism in these
modern times.

It must be remembered also that Spain, in the years following her brilliant conquests of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, lost strength and vigor through the corruption at home induced by the
unearned wealth that flowed into the mother country from the colonies, and by the draining away of
her best blood. Nor did her sons ever develop that economic spirit which is the permanent foundation
of all empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies flow through their country, principally to London
and Amsterdam, there to form in more practical hands the basis of the British and Dutch colonial
empires.

The priest and the soldier were supreme, so her best sons took up either the cross or the sword to
maintain her dominion in the distant colonies, a movement which, long continued, spelled for her a
form of national suicide. The soldier expended his strength and generally laid down his life on alien
soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock to carry on the work according to his standards. The
priest under the celibate system, in its better days left no offspring at all and in the days of its
corruption none bred and reared under the influences that make for social and political progress. The
dark chambers of the Inquisition stifled all advance in thought, so the civilization and the culture of
Spain, as well as her political system, settled into rigid forms to await only the inevitable process of
stagnation and decay. In her proudest hour an old soldier, who had lost one of his hands fighting her
battles against the Turk at Lepanto, employed the other in writing the masterpiece of her literature,
which is really a caricature of the nation.

There is much in the career of Spain that calls to mind the dazzling beauty of her “dark-glancing
daughters,” with its early bloom, its startling—almost morbid—brilliance, and its premature decay.
Rapid and brilliant was her rise, gradual and inglorious her steady decline, from the bright morning
when the banners of Castile and Aragon were flung triumphantly from the battlements of the
Alhambra, to the short summer, not so long gone, when at Cavite and Santiago with swift, decisive
havoc the last ragged remnants of the once world-dominating power were blown into space and time,

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to hover disembodied there, a lesson and a warning to future generations. Whatever her final place in
the records of mankind, whether as the pioneer of modern civilization or the buccaneer of the nations
or, as would seem most likely, a goodly mixture of both, she has at least—with the exception only of
her great mother, Rome—furnished the most instructive lessons in political pathology yet recorded,
and the advice to students of world progress to familiarize themselves with her history is even more
apt today than when it first issued from the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay nearly a century ago.
Hardly had she reached the zenith of her power when the disintegration began, and one by one her
brilliant conquests dropped away, to leave her alone in her faded splendor, with naught but her
vaunting pride left, another “Niobe of nations.” In the countries more in contact with the trend of
civilization and more susceptible to revolutionary influences from the mother country this separation
came from within, while in the remoter parts the archaic and outgrown system dragged along until a
stronger force from without destroyed it.

Nowhere was the crystallization of form and principle more pronounced than in religious life, which
fastened upon the mother country a deadening weight that hampered all progress, and in the colonies,
notably in the Philippines, virtually converted her government into a hagiarchy that had its face toward
the past and either could not or would not move with the current of the times. So, when “the shot
heard round the world,” the declaration of humanity’s right to be and to become, in its all-encircling
sweep, reached the lands controlled by her it was coldly received and blindly rejected by the
governing powers, and there was left only the slower, subtler, but none the less sure, process of
working its way among the people to burst in time in rebellion and the destruction of the conservative
forces that would repress it.

In the opening years of the nineteenth century the friar orders in the Philippines had reached the
apogee of their power and usefulness. Their influence was everywhere felt and acknowledged, while
the country still prospered under the effects of the vigorous and progressive administrations of Anda
and Vargas in the preceding century. Native levies had fought loyally under Spanish leadership against
Dutch and British invaders, or in suppressing local revolts among their own people, which were
always due to some specific grievance, never directed definitely against the Spanish sovereignty. The
Philippines were shut off from contact with any country but Spain, and even this communication was
restricted and carefully guarded. There was an elaborate central government which, however, hardly
touched the life of the native peoples, who were guided and governed by the parish priests, each
town being in a way an independent entity.

Of this halcyon period, just before the process of disintegration began, there has fortunately been left
a record which may be characterized as the most notable Spanish literary production relating to the
Philippines, being the calm, sympathetic, judicial account of one who had spent his manhood in the
work there and who, full of years and experience, sat down to tell the story of their life.4 In it there
are no puerile whinings, no querulous curses that tropical Malays do not order their lives as did the
people of the Spanish village where he may have been reared, no selfish laments of ingratitude over
blessings unasked and only imperfectly understood by the natives, no fatuous self-deception as to the
real conditions, but a patient consideration of the difficulties encountered, the good accomplished, and
the unavoidable evils incident to any human work. The country and the people, too, are described
with the charming simplicity of the eyes that see clearly, the brain that ponders deeply, and the heart
that beats sympathetically. Through all the pages of his account runs the quiet strain of peace and
contentment, of satisfaction with the existing order, for he had looked upon the creation and saw that
it was good. There is “neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” but the deliberate recital of the facts
warmed and illumined by the geniality of a soul to whom age and experience had brought, not a sour
cynicism, but the mellowing influence of a ripened philosophy. He was such an old man as may fondly
be imagined walking through the streets of Parañaque in stately benignity amid the fear and respect of
the brown people over whom he watched.

But in all his chronicle there is no suggestion of anything more to hope for, anything beyond. Beautiful
as the picture is, it is that of a system which had reached maturity: a condition of stagnation, not of
growth. In less than a decade, the terrific convulsions in European politics made themselves felt even
in the remote Philippines, and then began the gradual drawing away of the people from their rulers—
blind gropings and erratic wanderings at first, but nevertheless persistent and vigorous tendencies.

The first notable influence was the admission of representatives for the Philippines into the Spanish
Cortes under the revolutionary governments and the abolition of the trade monopoly with Mexico.
The last galleon reached Manila in 1815, and soon foreign commercial interests were permitted, in a
restricted way, to enter the country. Then with the separation of Mexico and the other American
colonies from Spain a more marked change was brought about in that direct communication was
established with the mother country, and the absolutism of the hagiarchy first questioned by the
numbers of Peninsular Spaniards who entered the islands to trade, some even to settle and rear
families there. These also affected the native population in the larger centers by the spread of their
ideas, which were not always in conformity with those that for several centuries the friars had been
inculcating into their wards. Moreover, there was a not-inconsiderable portion of the population,
sprung from the friars themselves, who were eager to adopt the customs and ideas of the Spanish

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immigrants.

The suppression of many of the monasteries in Spain in 1835 caused a large influx of the
disestablished monks into the Philippines in search for a haven, and a home, thus bringing about a
conflict with the native clergy, who were displaced from their best holdings to provide berths for the
newcomers. At the same time, the increase of education among the native priests brought the natural
demand for more equitable treatment by the Spanish friar, so insistent that it even broke out into open
rebellion in 1843 on the part of a young Tagalog who thought himself aggrieved in this respect.

Thus the struggle went on, with stagnation above and some growth below, so that the governors were
ever getting further away from the governed, and for such a movement there is in the course of nature
but one inevitable result, especially when outside influences are actively at work penetrating the social
system and making for better things. Among these influences four cumulative ones may be noted: the
spread of journalism, the introduction of steamships into the Philippines, the return of the Jesuits, and
the opening of the Suez Canal.

The printing-press entered the islands with the conquest, but its use had been strictly confined to
religious works until about the middle of the past century, when there was a sudden awakening and
within a few years five journals were being published. In 1848 appeared the first regular newspaper
of importance, El Diario de Manila, and about a decade later the principal organ of the Spanish-
Filipino population, El Comercio, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down to the
present. While rigorously censored, both politically and religiously, and accessible to only an
infinitesimal portion of the people, they still performed the service of letting a few rays of light into the
Cimmerian intellectual gloom of the time and place.

With the coming of steam navigation communication between the different parts of the islands was
facilitated and trade encouraged, with all that such a change meant in the way of breaking up the old
isolation and tending to a common understanding. Spanish power, too, was for the moment more
firmly established, and Moro piracy in Luzon and the Bisayan Islands, which had been so great a
drawback to the development of the country, was forever ended.

The return of the Jesuits produced two general results tending to dissatisfaction with the existing
order. To them was assigned the missionary field of Mindanao, which meant the displacement of the
Recollect Fathers in the missions there, and for these other berths had to be found. Again the native
clergy were the losers in that they had to give up their best parishes in Luzon, especially around
Manila and Cavite, so the breach was further widened and the soil sown with discontent. But more
far-reaching than this immediate result was the educational movement inaugurated by the Jesuits. The
native, already feeling the vague impulses from without and stirred by the growing restlessness of the
times, here saw a new world open before him. A considerable portion of the native population in the
larger centers, who had shared in the economic progress of the colony, were enabled to look beyond
their daily needs and to afford their children an opportunity for study and advancement—a condition
and a need met by the Jesuits for a time.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 communication with the mother country became cheaper,
quicker, surer, so that large numbers of Spaniards, many of them in sympathy with the republican
movements at home, came to the Philippines in search of fortunes and generally left half-caste families
who had imbibed their ideas. Native boys who had already felt the intoxication of such learning as the
schools of Manila afforded them began to dream of greater wonders in Spain, now that the journey
was possible for them. So began the definite movements that led directly to the disintegration of the
friar régime.

In the same year occurred the revolution in the mother country, which had tired of the old corrupt
despotism. Isabella II was driven into exile and the country left to waver about uncertainly for several
years, passing through all the stages of government from red radicalism to absolute conservatism,
finally adjusting itself to the middle course of constitutional monarchism. During the effervescent and
ephemeral republic there was sent to the Philippines a governor who set to work to modify the old
system and establish a government more in harmony with modern ideas and more democratic in form.
His changes were hailed with delight by the growing class of Filipinos who were striving for more
consideration in their own country, and who, in their enthusiasm and the intoxication of the moment,
perhaps became more radical than was safe under the conditions—surely too radical for their
religious guides watching and waiting behind the veil of the temple.

In January, 1872, an uprising occurred in the naval arsenal at Cavite, with a Spanish non-
commissioned officer as one of the leaders. From the meager evidence now obtainable, this would
seem to have been purely a local mutiny over the service questions of pay and treatment, but in it the
friars saw their opportunity. It was blazoned forth, with all the wild panic that was to characterize the
actions of the governing powers from that time on, as the premature outbreak of a general insurrection
under the leadership of the native clergy, and rigorous repressive measures were demanded. Three
native priests, notable for their popularity among their own people, one an octogenarian and the other
two young canons of the Manila Cathedral, were summarily garroted, along with the renegade

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Spanish officer who had participated in the mutiny. No record of any trial of these priests has ever
been brought to light. The Archbishop, himself a secular5 clergyman, stoutly refused to degrade them
from their holy office, and they wore their sacerdotal robes at the execution, which was conducted in
a hurried, fearful manner. At the same time a number of young Manilans who had taken conspicuous
part in the “liberal” demonstrations were deported to the Ladrone Islands or to remote islands of the
Philippine group itself.

This was the beginning of the end. Yet there immediately followed the delusive calm which ever
precedes the fatal outburst, lulling those marked for destruction to a delusive security. The two
decades following were years of quiet, unobtrusive growth, during which the Philippine Islands made
the greatest economic progress in their history. But this in itself was preparing the final catastrophe,
for if there be any fact well established in human experience it is that with economic development the
power of organized religion begins to wane—the rise of the merchant spells the decline of the priest.
A sordid change, from masses and mysteries to sugar and shoes, this is often said to be, but it should
be noted that the epochs of greatest economic activity have been those during which the generality of
mankind have lived fuller and freer lives, and above all that in such eras the finest intellects and the
grandest souls have been developed.

Nor does an institution that has been slowly growing for three centuries, molding the very life and fiber
of the people, disintegrate without a violent struggle, either in its own constitution or in the life of the
people trained under it. Not only the ecclesiastical but also the social and political system of the
country was controlled by the religious orders, often silently and secretly, but none the less effectively.
This is evident from the ceaseless conflict that went on between the religious orders and the Spanish
political administrators, who were at every turn thwarted in their efforts to keep the government
abreast of the times.

The shock of the affair of 1872 had apparently stunned the Filipinos, but it had at the same time
brought them to the parting of the ways and induced a vague feeling that there was something radically
wrong, which could only be righted by a closer union among themselves. They began to consider that
their interests and those of the governing powers were not the same. In these feelings of distrust
toward the friars they were stimulated by the great numbers of immigrant Spaniards who were then
entering the country, many of whom had taken part in the republican movements at home and who,
upon the restoration of the monarchy, no doubt thought it safer for them to be at as great a distance
as possible from the throne. The young Filipinos studying in Spain came from different parts of the
islands, and by their association there in a foreign land were learning to forget their narrow
sectionalism; hence the way was being prepared for some concerted action. Thus, aided and
encouraged by the anti-clerical Spaniards in the mother country, there was growing up a new
generation of native leaders, who looked toward something better than the old system.

It is with this period in the history of the country—the author’s boyhood—that the story of Noli Me
Tangere deals. Typical scenes and characters are sketched from life with wonderful accuracy, and
the picture presented is that of a master-mind, who knew and loved his subject. Terror and
repression were the order of the day, with ever a growing unrest in the higher circles, while the native
population at large seemed to be completely cowed—“brutalized” is the term repeatedly used by
Rizal in his political essays. Spanish writers of the period, observing only the superficial movements,—
some of which were indeed fantastical enough, for

—and not heeding the currents at work below, take great delight in ridiculing the pretensions of the
young men seeking advancement, while they indulge in coarse ribaldry over the wretched condition of
the great mass of the “Indians.” The author, however, himself a “miserable Indian,” vividly depicts the
unnatural conditions and dominant characters produced under the outworn system of fraud and force,
at the same time presenting his people as living, feeling, struggling individuals, with all the frailties of
human nature and all the possibilities of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally he throws into
marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by the Spanish writers in referring to the Filipinos,
making clear the application of the self-evident proposition that no ordinary human being in the
presence of superior force can very well conduct himself as a man unless he be treated as such.

The friar orders, deluded by their transient triumph and secure in their pride of place, became more
arrogant, more domineering than ever. In the general administration the political rulers were at every
turn thwarted, their best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured too far their own security threatened;
for in the three-cornered wrangle which lasted throughout the whole of the Spanish domination, the
friar orders had, in addition to the strength derived from their organization and their wealth, the
Damoclean weapon of control over the natives to hang above the heads of both governor and
archbishop. The curates in the towns, always the real rulers, became veritable despots, so that no

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“they,

Who in oppression’s darkness caved have dwelt,
They are not eagles, nourished with the day;
What marvel, then, at times, if they mistake their way?”

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voice dared to raise itself against them, even in the midst of conditions which the humblest indio was
beginning to feel dumbly to be perverted and unnatural, and that, too, after three centuries of training
under the system that he had ever been taught to accept as “the will of God.”

The friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims that had meant so much to the
founders and early workers of their orders, if indeed the great majority of those of the later day had
ever realized the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of the time delight in characterizing
them as the meanest of the Spanish peasantry, when not something worse, who had been “lassoed,”
taught a few ritualistic prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed in isolated towns as lords
and masters of the native population, with all the power and prestige over a docile people that the
sacredness of their holy office gave them. These writers treat the matter lightly, seeing in it rather a
huge joke on the “miserable Indians,” and give the friars great credit for “patriotism,” a term which in
this connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted Dr. Johnson’s famous
definition, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and as individuals, must be estimated
according to their own standards—the application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair.
They undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential activities of his life according
to their ideas, so upon them must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained: to destroy the
freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him for his conduct is a paradox into which the
learned men often fell, perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored to shape
the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence but also in the next. Their vows were poverty,
chastity, and obedience.

The vow of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a few years after the founding of
Manila royal decrees began to issue on the subject of complaints received by the King over the
usurpation of lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in the heyday of the
institution of monasticism in Europe—pious gifts, deathbed bequests, pilgrims’ offerings—the friar
orders gradually secured the richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled portions of the
Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by the Tagalogs. Not always, however, it must in
justice be recorded, were such doubtful means resorted to, for there were instances where the
missionary was the pioneer, gathering about himself a band of devoted natives and plunging into the
unsettled parts to build up a town with its fields around it, which would later become a friar estate.
With the accumulated incomes from these estates and the fees for religious observances that poured
into their treasuries, the orders in their nature of perpetual corporations became the masters of the
situation, the lords of the country. But this condition was not altogether objectionable; it was in the
excess of their greed that they went astray, for the native peoples had been living under this system
through generations and not until they began to feel that they were not receiving fair treatment did they
question the authority of a power which not only secured them a peaceful existence in this life but also
assured them eternal felicity in the next.

With only the shining exceptions that are produced in any system, no matter how false its premises or
how decadent it may become, to uphold faith in the intrinsic soundness of human nature, the vow of
chastity was never much more than a myth. Through the tremendous influence exerted over a
fanatically religious people, who implicitly followed the teachings of the reverend fathers, once their
confidence had been secured, the curate was seldom to be gainsaid in his desires. By means of the
secret influence in the confessional and the more open political power wielded by him, the fairest was
his to command, and the favored one and her people looked upon the choice more as an honor than
otherwise, for besides the social standing that it gave her there was the proud prospect of becoming
the mother of children who could claim kinship with the dominant race. The curate’s “companion” or
the sacristan’s wife was a power in the community, her family was raised to a place of importance
and influence among their own people, while she and her ecclesiastical offspring were well cared for.
On the death or removal of the curate, it was almost invariably found that she had been provided with
a husband or protector and a not inconsiderable amount of property—an arrangement rather
appealing to a people among whom the means of living have ever been so insecure.

That this practise was not particularly offensive to the people among whom they dwelt may explain
the situation, but to claim that it excuses the friars approaches dangerously close to casuistry. Still, as
long as this arrangement was decently and moderately carried out, there seems to have been no great
objection, nor from a worldly point of view, with all the conditions considered, could there be much.
But the old story of excess, of unbridled power turned toward bad ends, again recurs, at the same
time that the ideas brought in by the Spaniards who came each year in increasing numbers and the
principles observed by the young men studying in Europe cast doubt upon the fitness of such a state
of affairs. As they approached their downfall, like all mankind, the friars became more open, more
insolent, more shameless, in their conduct.

The story of Maria Clara, as told in Noli Me Tangere, is by no means an exaggerated instance, but
rather one of the few clean enough to bear the light, and her fate, as depicted in the epilogue, is said
to be based upon an actual occurrence with which the author must have been familiar.

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The vow of obedience—whether considered as to the Pope, their highest religious authority, or to the
King of Spain, their political liege—might not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be
evaded and defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the Escorial decree after decree, only
to be archived in Manila, sometimes after a hollow pretense of compliance. A large part of the
records of Spanish domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went on between the
Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and the friar orders, over the questions of the
episcopal visitation and the enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating the monks
to their original status of missionaries, with the friars invariably victorious in their contentions. Royal
decrees ordering inquiries into the titles to the estates of the men of poverty and those providing for
the education of the natives in Spanish were merely sneered at and left to molder in harmless quiet.
Not without good grounds for his contention, the friar claimed that the Spanish dominion over the
Philippines depended upon him, and he therefore confidently set himself up as the best judge of how
that dominion should be maintained.

Thus there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of the century just past the
phenomena so frequently met with in modern societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag
out their lives under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is being called into
question, with forces actively at work disintegrating it, yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared
under it unprepared for a new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms and beliefs,
once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply examined, doubt and suspicion were the order of
the day. Moreover, it must ever be borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest, except in the parts
where the friars were the landlords, was not general among the people, the masses of whom were still
sunk in their “loved Egyptian night,” but affected only a very small proportion of the population—for
the most part young men who were groping their way toward something better, yet without any very
clearly conceived idea of what that better might be, and among whom was to be found the usual
sprinkling of “sunshine patriots” and omnipresent opportunists ready for any kind of trouble that will
afford them a chance to rise.

Add to the apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid the shadows of religious
superstition and to the unrest of the few, the fact that the orders were in absolute control of the
political machinery of the country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth amortized in their hands;
add also the ever-present jealousies, petty feuds, and racial hatreds, for which Manila and the
Philippines, with their medley of creeds and races, offer such a fertile field, all fostered by the
governing class for the maintenance of the old Machiavelian principle of “divide and rule,” and the
sum is about the most miserable condition under which any portion of mankind ever tried to fulfill
nature’s inexorable laws of growth.

II

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, The Light of Asia.

“Ah, simple people, how little do you know the blessing that you enjoy! Neither hunger, nor
nakedness, nor inclemency of the weather troubles you. With the payment of seven reals per year,
you remain free of contributions. You do not have to close your houses with bolts. You do not fear
that the district troopers will come in to lay waste your fields, and trample you under foot at your own
firesides. You call ‘father’ the one who is in command over you. Perhaps there will come a time when
you will be more civilized, and you will break out in revolution; and you will wake terrified, at the
tumult of the riots, and will see blood flowing through these quiet fields, and gallows and guillotines
erected in these squares, which never yet have seen an execution.”6 Thus moralized a Spanish traveler
in 1842, just as that dolce far niente was drawing to its close. Already far-seeing men had begun to
raise in the Spanish parliament the question of the future of the Philippines, looking toward some
definite program for their care under modern conditions and for the adjustment of their relations with

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[xxiii]

And third came she who gives dark creeds their
power,
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress,
Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith,
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers;
The keeper of those keys which lock up Hells
And open Heavens. “Wilt thou dare,” she said,
“Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods,
Unpeople all the temples, shaking down
That law which feeds the priests and props the
realm?”
But Buddha answered, “What thou bidd’st me keep
Is form which passes, but the free Truth stands;
Get thee unto thy darkness.”

[xxiv]

the mother country. But these were mere Cassandra-voices—the horologe of time was striking for
Rome’s successor, as it did for Rome herself.

Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of
forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection
reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study. That
there will be an outbreak somewhere is as certain as that the plant will grow toward the light, even
under the most unfavorable conditions, for man’s nature is but the resultant of eternal forces that
ceaselessly and irresistibly interplay about and upon him, and somewhere this resultant will express
itself in thought or deed.

After three centuries of Spanish ecclesiastical domination in the Philippines, it was to be expected that
the wards would turn against their mentors the methods that had been used upon them, nor is it
especially remarkable that there was a decided tendency in some parts to revert to primitive
barbarism, but that concurrently a creative genius—a bard or seer—should have been developed
among a people who, as a whole, have hardly passed through the clan or village stage of society, can
be regarded as little less than a psychological phenomenon, and provokes the perhaps presumptuous
inquiry as to whether there may not be some things about our common human nature that the learned
doctors have not yet included in their anthropometric diagrams.

On the western shore of the Lake of Bay in the heart of the Philippines clusters the village of
Kalamba, first established by the Jesuit Fathers in the early days of the conquest, and upon their
expulsion in 1767 taken over by the Crown, which later transferred it to the Dominicans, under
whose care the fertile fields about it became one of the richest of the friar estates. It can hardly be
called a town, even for the Philippines, but is rather a market-village, set as it is at the outlet of the rich
country of northern Batangas on the open waterway to Manila and the outside world. Around it
flourish the green rice-fields, while Mount Makiling towers majestically near in her moods of cloud
and sunshine, overlooking the picturesque curve of the shore and the rippling waters of the lake.
Shadowy to the eastward gleam the purple crests of Banahao and Cristobal, and but a few miles to
the southwestward dim-thundering, seething, earth-rocking Taal mutters and moans of the world’s
birth-throes. It is the center of a region rich in native lore and legend, as it sleeps through the dusty
noons when the cacao leaves droop with the heat and dreams through the silvery nights, waking twice
or thrice a week to the endless babble and ceaseless chatter of an Oriental market where the noisy
throngs make of their trading as much a matter of pleasure and recreation as of business.

Directly opposite this market-place, in a house facing the village church, there was born in 1861 into
the already large family of one of the more prosperous tenants on the Dominican estate a boy who
was to combine in his person the finest traits of the Oriental character with the best that Spanish and
European culture could add, on whom would fall the burden of his people’s woes to lead him over
the via dolorosa of struggle and sacrifice, ending in his own destruction amid the crumbling ruins of
the system whose disintegration he himself had done so much to compass.

José Rizal-Mercado y Alonso, as his name emerges from the confusion of Filipino nomenclature, was
of Malay extraction, with some distant strains of Spanish and Chinese blood. His genealogy reveals
several persons remarkable for intellect and independence of character, notably a Philippine Eloise
and Abelard, who, drawn together by their common enthusiasm for study and learning, became his
maternal grandparents, as well as a great-uncle who was a traveler and student and who directed the
boy’s early studies. Thus from the beginning his training was exceptional, while his mind was stirred
by the trouble already brewing in his community, and from the earliest hours of consciousness he saw
about him the wrongs and injustices which overgrown power will ever develop in dealing with a
weaker subject. One fact of his childhood, too, stands out clearly, well worthy of record: his mother
seems to have been a woman of more than ordinary education for the time and place, and, pleased
with the boy’s quick intelligence, she taught him to read Spanish from a copy of the Vulgate in that
language, which she had somehow managed to secure and keep in her possession—the old, old story
of the Woman and the Book, repeated often enough under strange circumstances, but under none
stranger than these. The boy’s father was well-to-do, so he was sent at the age of eight to study in the
new Jesuit school in Manila, not however before he had already inspired some awe in his simple
neighbors by the facility with which he composed verses in his native tongue.

He began his studies in a private house while waiting for an opportunity to enter the Ateneo, as the
Jesuit school is called, and while there he saw one of his tutors, Padre Burgos, haled to an
ignominious death on the garrote as a result of the affair of 1872. This made a deep impression on his
childish mind and, in fact, seems to have been one of the principal factors in molding his ideas and
shaping his career. That the effect upon him was lasting and that his later judgment confirmed him in
the belief that a great injustice had been done, are shown by the fact that his second important work,
El Filibusterismo, written about 1891, and miscalled by himself a “novel,” for it is really a series of
word-paintings constituting a terrific arraignment of the whole régime, was dedicated to the three
priests executed in 1872, in these words: “Religion, in refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt
the crime imputed to you; the government, in surrounding your case with mystery and shadow, gives

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[xxvi]

reason for belief in some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, in venerating your
memory...